This research aimed to assess the effects of economic status (ES), ideation and social interaction regarding family planning on fertility levels, fertility change, and women's fertility intentions in Ghana, Kenya and Senegal. Specifically, it aimed to determine (a) the relative …
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The dissertation examines the recent trend in several African states toward the use of more local languages in early education, a curious phenomenon given empirical and historical preference for linguistic homogeneity in state-building. The explanation for these recent changes r…
Depuis le début des années 1990, Internet a mobilisé les êtres humains à travers des discours théoriques et institutionnels qui lui sont dédiés. Ces discours autant optimistes que critiques ont cherché à présenter les conséquences de l'avènement d'Internet dans la société modern…
Muslim communities developing around charismatic Sufi marabouts in twentieth-century West Africa represented the fruition of enduring values concerning the carrying of sacred knowledge in the bodily presence of Muslim scholars. Muslim mystics were not ahistorical constants in th…
My dissertation examines the history of the encounter between Islam and African local cultures, focusing on how the coming of Islam reshaped the lives of the local populations of the Middle Casamance. It retraces the changing spiritual geography of this region from African relig…
This dissertation examines the historical roots of the Muridiyya through an analysis of the internal dynamics of the development of Islam in 19 th century Senegal and a reflection on the changing meaning of Islam as agent of cultural and social change. I reconstruct the genesis …
This project is a critical and comparative investigation of Western and non-Western practices of body modification. Situated in the realm of feminist political theory, the project engages the literature and debates concerning embodiment, or the symbolic and concrete meanings of …
This study in linguistic and sociocultural anthropology examines how efforts to promote "traditional medicine" in postcolonial Senegal have opposed but ironically borrowed from Western biomedicine, redefining the role of the healer and the therapeutic process. In typical encount…
Muslim countries have experienced wide variation in levels of Islamist political mobilization in the contemporary period, both across geography and across time. Islamist political mobilization is manifest in multiple forms, including electoral mobilization in support of Islamist…
Oral literature from Africa has been the focus of many scholarly works for a several decades. However, little interest has been given to the verbal of women. This dissertation puts the verbal art of women, and especially the songs performed at the wedding by women for women, at …
This dissertation examines the history of one branch of the Muridiyya Sufi order in Senegal in West Africa founded by Shaykh Ibrahima Faty M'Backé (Maam Cerno). The Murids, the only indigenous Sufi order in sub-Saharan Africa, began to coalesce in the late 1870's just prior to F…
This dissertation draws from the social sciences, the humanities, and the field of medicine to chronicle how social life bears on forms of genetic knowledge. Relying on methods of ethnographic fieldwork, this research builds upon scholarship that takes seriously the ways genetic…
This study examines rural and urban women's knowledge and practice within the context of two decades of health sector reform in Senegal. It addresses the simultaneous influence of macro-level forces, such as international policy and national health reform, and micro-level social…
Identities--including ethnicities, nationalities, and regional and religious affiliations--influence visual arts throughout Africa. Artists also practice specific techniques and styles of art that have been developed to reflect these particular identities. Artists also develop t…
Young women who participate in Dakar's burgeoning, cross-class Islamist movement shape participant identities based on a desire for moral change, and not on a specific set of political or economic grievances. The Sunnite movement, which has proliferated since the mid-1990's larg…
This dissertation examines the role of local oral and written sources in understanding belief and practice among followers of the Muridiyya Sufi order of Senegal. To date, scholarship on Muridiyya has tended to look to political and economic dimensions of the movement to explain…
This dissertation argues that the category of the literary emerged in colonial Senegal through the exclusion of some indigenous textual cultures and the translation of others. In readings of Mariama Bâ, Ousmane Sembène, Cheikh Aliou Ndao, Maam Yunus Dieng and others, I examine h…